MXPlay: Better Than A Jukebox

Digital music is everywhere now. The trouble with digital music is that superior sound quality comes in a variety of file types, and usually with large sizes. As digital music has become more and more widespread, the quality has...

Digital music is everywhere now. The trouble with digital music is that superior sound quality comes in a variety of file types, and usually with large sizes. As digital music has become more and more widespread, the quality has deteriorated, becoming an afterthought, when marketing online music stores, digital music players, and jukebox software for your computer.

I own an iPod have been a Winamp fan for a long time. I buy music via iTunes and sometimes use it to rip CDs and burn mixes. The trouble is, while iTunes is fully featured and tied into a great music store, and while Winamp is lightweight and lets me play my music without eating up a lot of memory, neither of them are particularly attentive to audio quality, or offer any tools to customize the listening experience. MXPlay, a new digital music player and jukebox, is completely different. The app has all of the tools of your everyday jukebox app and then some, but there's a special focus on audio quality and the listening experience, and it shows.

Downloading and installing MXPlay was a breeze. The installer is lightweight, only 7MB, and there are versions of the app for Mac OS and Windows XP. (No word on Vista support, so try at your own risk.) As soon I opened the player for the first time, I was prompted to add music from my music library. Since my music library is shared on my home theater machine, I tried to browse over to it. so I could import some music. No such luck: MXPlay promptly froze on me, and I had to end the process and re-open it. I also noticed that there's no compact-view that saves screen real-estate, you either have it open or minimized, and when it's open it's pretty large on-screen. As polished as MXPlay is and as fully featured as it is, it's still a beta, so expect to have the occasional issue or run into a glitch here and there.

Even with the occasional bug, MXPlay is a very impressive application. Even the default audio settings provide a richness and quality that I didn't know I was missing in my music until I had a chance to hear it again. MXPlay has a built-in web browser, and the homepage (when viewed inside the player) links you to a variety of different music discovery sites with bands you can read about, genres to explore, and most importantly music you can listen to. A click on "Scissor Kick" took me over to an alt-electronica heaven I didn't know existed, and MXPlay immediately scanned the site for embedded music and started playing. I also took advantage of the option to add the song links to my music library, so I could come back to them and play them from within MXPlay as long as the site had the songs available online.

You can easily browse different genres of music using the various music discovery services, but going to a different site with different streams will interrupt the one currently playing. I decided to see if the excellent audio quality was just from online streams, or if I would get better sound from my own mp3s, so I dragged a few of my own into the music library and was pleasantly surprised. MXPlay took existing music that I had played before, and seemed to draw out the nuances of the tracks.

One of MXPlay's best audio-enhancing features is the ability to customize speaker and listener position very easily, using a drag-and-drop interface. Simply click on the speaker you'd like to move, or the little head icon that represents where you're sitting, and make the audio setup as close to real life as possible. MXPlay does the rest for you, adjusting the fade, bass and treble levels, and volume to match the setup you've arranged. Swing the speakers in closer if you're sitting at a small desk, or move them out if you're sitting on the couch. You can also customize the reverb, maxing it out to sound like you're hearing the song performed in a church hall laden with echoes, or minimizing it for a softer listening experience. You can also customize listening settings for different songs, or create listening spaces to save and use later depending on how you feel. MXPlay calls these customized settings "AudioSpaces."

Another one of MXPlay's cool features is the ability to customize the AudioSpace with videos and photos. Open a video at YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, or UnCut Video inside the MXPlay's built-in web browser, or photos and videos from your computer, and you can add it to your AudioSpace and watch the video play while your music is playing over it. It may not have anything to do with the audio quality, but it's a neat trick that adds a personal touch to your music. Video AudioSpaces are also sharable, so you can browse featured AudioSpaces with their embedded videos, play them, and listen to someone else's chosen tunes and video. Some people might want to listen to their digital music in MXPlay quality, with the video for the song playing in their AudioSpace, for example.

MXPlay isn't trying to be a music store, at least not yet. They're not interested in just being a jukebox or music player, either. The real strength of the app is its audio quality, and the technology under the hood that gives your music a fuller, deeper experience. I'm by no means a true audiophile; I don't buy expensive cables and speakers to enjoy my music, but I can tell the difference between flat stereo and rich audio quality, and MXPlay makes a difference. The download is free, but keep in mind that the program is still in beta. All in all, hoever, I was really impressed with MXPlay, and I'll probably keep using it for a while.